Take a bold leap instead of a tentative step

“Maybe I never will change the whole world. But every day, I can change my world.”

Those are the words of profession leader Lindsay Stevenson, CPA, CGMA. She’s back on the JofA podcast, this time in person from her house in South Dakota. Stevenson discussed technology adoption, how her firm approaches remote work, and why keeping a journal at least for part of the year is important to her.

Stevenson, chief transformation officer at the firm BPM, also addressed how she views fear as it relates to career moves — and how she thought about that differently in a 2019 conversation.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• The reason her firm has geographical regions and a virtual region.
• Why unplugging is difficult but necessary for Stevenson.
• Why she likes an at-home vacation more than a big trip.
• Her approach to overcoming fear and how that approach has changed in the past six years.
• AI: its danger, its potential, and how she is using it.
• The gratitude-based journaling practice she recommends.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: Welcome back to the Journal of Accountancy podcast. This episode is part of a Midwest road swing that your host — that’s me, Neil Amato — is making. I’m now in the state of South Dakota talking to South Dakota resident Lindsay Stevenson. Lindsay, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for welcoming me into your home and thanks for being here on this special summer road swing edition of the JofA podcast.

Lindsay Stevenson: Thanks, Neil. I’m super excited as always to be here, and I’m glad you got a chance to swing in.

Amato: Yeah, this has been great. It is the wrap-up of three episodes that are planned on site in the center of the country. You are chief transformation officer at the firm BPM. That firm has its HQ in San Francisco. But as I said, you’re in South Dakota, so we’re recording this episode in South Dakota. It’s hundreds, if not more than 1,000 miles from your firm. For you, how does it work being remote to the headquarters of the firm for which you’re chief transformation officer?

Stevenson: It’s really interesting, really since I joined. Back in 2021, I think, is when I started at BPM, we probably had about 750 colleagues and maybe 100 of them were what we would consider our virtual region. As we’ve grown, now we’re up to 1,250-ish colleagues, and we have over 700 that would be considered what we call our virtual region.

Our CEO, maybe two or three years ago — every firm always has regions. They’ll say that this is our Pacific Northwest region and our West Coast region, whatever it might be, and he said, we really should have a region for all of our people that don’t work near an office or maybe choose not to come into an office depending on their family situation, whatever that might look like.

We created the virtual region, and so we have a managing partner of our virtual region. They help us stay connected and they plan events and we get to connect in different ways. That’s been really great for me because South Dakota was already home when I got hired, so I never had any intention of moving to an office, and then about two years ago, we actually opened an office in Sioux Falls.

We have colleagues that are just about an hour north of me, so we have this little core group that hangs out when we can. Yeah, it’s worked out really, really great. It’s been amazing and I can still have my kid’s hockey life, and my golf life, and my friend life, and still get to do the work I love. It’s been amazing.

Amato: You mentioned South Dakota is home. Is this where you grew up?

Stevenson: It is not. We transplanted here for family, but I grew up in the Pacific Northwest in Washington state. Went to Gonzaga. Still love my roots there, but my husband’s family was all here in the Midwest. My parents were kind of doing their own thing, and so we decided, well, we’ll move close to your family and spend time there, and then we fell in love with South Dakota, shockingly. We didn’t think we would, but we love it here.

Amato: Great. Tell me what you love about it.

Stevenson: Well, some of it is our neighborhood. I don’t know if all of South Dakota is this way, but probably because we’re a fairly small state and population is pretty spread out. The neighborhood we live in, our kids can still ride their bikes unsupervised and go to someone’s house and play outside and you really don’t worry about things.

That’s how I grew up, and it’s been really amazing to be able to see, at least our youngest grew up that way. We have two adult children that think they were deprived because we didn’t move here until they were in high school. They missed out on the quiet life. But yeah, just the pace of life here. Everyone hangs out. People do fire pits in their driveways and you drive by on your golf cart and you stop and say hi and have a conversation, and it’s just a really, really neat place to live. It just fits our lifestyle.

Amato: Now, you addressed this a little bit in your first answer about the remote nature of your job, but how do you feel? Are you comfortable being so far away from the main office? It’s still two time zones away.

Stevenson: It is. Like I said, we have a big virtual region, so we have people in every time zone, and in fact, my team is spread across three. We’re used to working around each other and figuring out what times work and when people are working. But I actually visit our offices quite a bit. Between California and South Dakota up here in Sioux Falls, I’ve been there a few times every year. I try and get around and get a chance to get into the offices. But really, I don’t know, when you start virtual, it doesn’t seem awkward or weird because that’s just how the team has always worked. In fact, I have two people on my team I’ve never met in person. We’ve just been virtual the whole time.

Amato: There is one writer that I manage that I have never met in person. Yeah, the same. One of the themes of this series of episodes is summer, summer travel, summer unplugging. Do you have, or have you had recently, any big summer travel?

Stevenson: If I’m being honest, we do hockey a lot here. My son plays on a summer hockey team and does hockey camps. Typically, if we’re gone and taking a vacation or we’re out on the road, it’s hockey-related. We’ve had quite a few trips for hockey this year. Then we took the week of the Fourth off and just hung out at home, and it was amazing.

Friends of ours have a beautiful pool, actually two of them, and they’re back to back, so we just rotate between pools, and we spend a lot of time just hanging out and spending time and watching the kids run around. I think that’s kind of my dream. My kid would tell you that he wishes that we would take him on some glorious, amazing vacation, but I travel for work, so I don’t know. The excitement is just staying close to home and doing things outside together. We golf a lot, too.

Amato: I think the staycation is underrated. You can definitely say, hey, I’m going to be at home, I’m going to enjoy the comforts of my home, see my friends, and not think about work. In a lot of ways, that can be less stressful than trying to travel and see a new place and fit in all the things.

Stevenson: It is amazing. I have to tell you, I’m a little bit of a planner. I like to know what’s coming and what’s happening. My husband is an absolute spontaneous, we’ll just figure it out as we go. Sometimes planning a really big vacation is not a break from work, because I feel the need, even though I know I want to break from that and I’ll tell myself, I’m not going to plan, I’m just going to go with the flow, and then it gets closer and I’m like, do we have this figured out? Do we know where we’re going? But I really don’t want it to be like that and I can’t help myself. Yeah, the staycation is the way out. It’s the way out of that.

Amato: How does that Fourth of July week, even if it’s four or five days, not a full week necessarily, how does it make you feel as far as being refreshed?

Stevenson: It’s really good. Typically, we take that week off. We’ve gone to the lake before and done a week at the lake, which water is my restorer. I love being near the water. It’s really fun to our kid to be on the water. But yeah, I think that week is such a great week because it’s right in the middle of the year. You’ve just come off the first six months sprint of the year of all the things that you’re probably cleaning up from last year you didn’t get to, plus all the new things that are coming up and just to take a pause and just a breath.

To me, that is really refreshing because, I don’t know about you, but our jobs are so cognitive. You’re always thinking, you’re always planning, you’re always digesting information and trying to see that systems opportunity. To get a break where you are really just not thinking is so amazing. It’s so amazing, and it gets you ready for that last half of the year of now we have these things we wanted to get done, we really want to push for those deadlines, and your brain is like, OK, I had a break, I’m ready to start operating again and I can start driving forward. There is something about just stopping, just no thinking, just breathing. That’s an amazing feeling.

Amato: It’s easy to say that there’s something about stopping, but I’m wondering, are you good at unplugging?

Stevenson: No. No, full disclosure. Some of it is just the way of the world right now. Your email is on your phone, your Teams is on your phone, different time zones. There’s just a little bit of societal pressure to be connected, and it’s so normal now you don’t even think about it. Even at 7 o’clock at night, we’re just wrapping up with dinner and I look at my phone and my email, which is so weird to really not ever disconnect.

No, I’m not good at it. I will say that my husband and my kids are really good at reminding me that I don’t need to be doing that. They’re very kind about it, but I’ll get a little nudge like, you checking email? Then I’m like, no, I was not doing that. That’s not what I was doing at all over here. I’m not great at it. I am trying to get better at it, but it’s ingrained. You’re just so used to being connected, it’s hard to say, “No, enough is enough.”

Amato: I have been given similar nudges by family members, for sure. Yes, I understand that feeling exactly. It was six years ago now, hard to believe. But six years ago was the first time we were willing to take the microphones and this recorder out in the wild where people were walking by and we were at ENGAGE, in a hallway, 2019. You were our first guest at that event. I might play a clip of that conversation in putting together this episode.

Stevenson: Oh, Lord.

Amato: But we talked about not letting fear get in the way of career aspirations. First, I look back on 2019 and say, we didn’t even know what we were going to be scared of. But what do you think about that when you reflect?

Stevenson: It’s always easier said than done. I do try and hold that for myself and for my team. It’s been an interesting journey. Transformation right now in the accounting profession is a state of being. It’s no longer aspirational. It’s happening to us, around us. Before, that first podcast when I was talking about fear, it was like, no one’s doing this stuff, no one’s talking about it. Or if they are, they’re definitely not hiring someone to come in and help them take those next steps.

Now in the marketplace, transformation, innovation — those words are just common vocabulary. If you’re not doing that, you aren’t going to survive this next round. We’re in a constant state of change. I do think when we were talking about fear and leaning into that from a career perspective, it’s even more so now because now we’re even competing with technology. How do we perform differently when the technology can do the things that we took for granted and they were just part of our job and we did it every day, and we didn’t even think about the fact that we were doing it every day.

Now we’re thinking, what am I going to do with my space and time as these technology tools allow me to stop doing the things I had no idea I was even spending so much time on. They were just so rote, but they were time consuming. I think that fear conversation is still super applicable because now the fear is, am I relevant? How can I remain relevant? How do I need to think differently so that I can’t be replaced by technology? That is all going to be that cognitive effort that we can’t replace with tech.

I think it still stands today when we talk about that fear of just take the leap, try something different, create the space for yourself to think and be really bold about it, really bold. Because if we’re tentative, by the time we take that tentative step, tech is already breathing on the neck, ready to go, already doing that thing. We have to leap. Tech is still here in a support role, and we are so much further along because we’re cognitively focused.

Amato: If I just say to you, how do you feel about AI, what’s your reaction?

Stevenson: I love AI. I think AI is an incredible tool. It’s dangerous, but it’s dangerous the same way that every other tech before it has been. The internet was a dangerous thing, probably still is a dangerous thing when it’s used in a way that hurts people. AI is the same thing. There’s ethics around it that we need to consider. But I love the idea that the things that are monotonous and effortful can be taken from my plate. I haven’t figured it out yet, so I don’t want to sit here and make you think like, yeah, I use AI every day, I’ve got it figured out, I never even do those simple tasks anymore. But I do have to think on a daily basis, could I leverage a tool to help me do this faster, better, easier. Even asking it, how could I do this faster, better, easier has really become the daily effort. Just using it for silly things.

The other day, I was doing work for a nonprofit right on my own time and we needed to figure out how we were going to stream two games from two different locations with two different people at the exact same time.

I used [ChatGPT] to figure that out, and it was a conversation with the AI about how that works. In 20 minutes, I had a checklist of what they needed to do, I had all of this information about how they do it, when they do it, how to set it up, that would have taken me five hours a year ago, and it took me 20 minutes this time. It opens up so many opportunities for us.

Amato: Getting back to some of that career focus when we had the episode six years ago, did you have a plan for, hey, this is where I want to be in five years, or this is where I want to be in 10 years?

Stevenson: I think you have a general sense. It’s less about what I want to be or where I want to be. Even now today as I think about my future, it’s more what impact contribution do I want to have? I would have told you in 2019, the dream was that I wanted to be a meaningful component to how the profession was shifting into the future. I would still answer that the same way today. I don’t know that that journey ever has a finish line.

I think that’s always something we aspire to, and I could care less what the title is. I really don’t know that it matters how people see me and much more of am I doing something that will result in ah “oh wow” moment 10 years from now. When we look back and say, wow, the profession shifted, I want to be a part of whatever that was. If it’s AI right now, which we can have a whole debate about AI and quantum computing, but technology in general.

I think I could fairly say, I want to be a part of technology changing the way we work for the better. I want people 10 years from now to say, I love my work because it is so meaningful to me and I don’t waste time on the things that were taking away from that opportunity, and Lindsay was part of that effort. She did something that mattered to make my life better now. That’s the stuff that I feel like if you ask me where I’m going to be 10 years from now, I have no idea where I will be, but I hope I’m doing the stuff that makes it amazing five, 10 years later.

Amato: Lindsay, that’s great. I think that would be an excellent spot to end on, but I will ask, anything else as a closing thought. We’re now into the last four months of 2025. Anything looking ahead to the end of this year and also into 2026 for the profession.

Stevenson: I think there’s so much. There’s so much happening. I’ll leave you with this. I have a very dear friend, her name is Sarah Elliott. She’s an incredible coach. She is a recovering CPA, I don’t even know if she calls it that, but coaches in the CPA profession, does leadership work. And a number of years ago, she introduced me to this process around giving thanks, and it’s all around visioning. At the beginning of November until Thanksgiving Day, you spend each day journaling about the vision of your life.

The reason I bring it up is because I think as we head into 2026, it’s so funny that our first time was 2019. We didn’t even know that a pandemic was coming. There’s so much happened since then that changed the world really and the way we think. Really thinking about your career, it is important, but it’s only one piece of your whole self. Your career is probably not going to be very meaningful if the rest of your life is not part of your vision, is not part of your dreaming, is not part of your goals.

The reason I bring up this 21 days of being grateful, or 26, however many days, whatever day it falls on for Thanksgiving this year. But to journal and think about your entire life, the scope of your life, when you envision being happy in your family sense, what does that mean? What are your kids doing? What are your parents doing? What is your partner doing? What are you doing? How does that all connect?

Then maybe you’re taking a day and you’re visualizing around your financial situation and what do you have the freedom to do and what does that look like? What would you do with that financial freedom and time freedom and all this stuff? Then work is a component of that. What work would really make you want to get up every morning and contribute to the world?

That effort for that very short three weeks, it goes by very fast, changes how you look at the year forward. I think if we can all spend just a little bit of time, 20 minutes in the morning just writing in this journal, thinking about it if you’re not a writer. Some of us are not writers. Recording it if you’re a verbal person. Whatever that might look like for you, I think now is the time to start doing that.

Tech is scary. Politics is scary. The economy is scary. Globalization is scary. We have a lot of scary. Sometimes that can feel so overwhelming. I went through that earlier this year where I was just like, I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I can get up in the morning. There’s too much to be afraid of.

Then I remembered, I went back to my journal, and I looked at the things that I was envisioning and I was like, I have the power to change my world. Maybe I can’t change the whole world. Maybe I never will change the whole world. But every day, I can change my world. I would just invite everyone to just spend some time on what it looks like when you change your world.

Amato: Lindsay Stevenson, thank you very much.

Stevenson: Thank you so much. It was so great to have you here. I’m so glad that you could make it.

Amato: Thanks, it’s been a great trip. It’s a great way to end.